The number of blind decoding operations in a wireless communication receiver is reduced. In one embodiment, a candidate set of transport formats is formed by eliminating one or more allowed transport formats, thus reducing the number of decode operations to be performed. In another embodiment, a received data transmission is partially decoded according to each of a plurality of transport formats, and decode quality metrics associated with each transport format are inspected. Only the transport formats yielding sufficiently high quality metrics are utilized to fully decode the transmission. In other embodiments, upon failure to successfully decode a received transmission, it is assumed to be a retransmission with a missed control transmission, and one or more transport formats specifying the position of a previous transmission in a buffer are added to the candidate set of transport formats. The received retransmission and previously received transmission are then HARQ combined and decoded.